This communication aims to study railway stations transitions in small and midsized shrinking cities. This question has already been addressed in the context of metropolitan areas, but there are still few researches concerning small and midsized cities. There is also a current research concerning shrinking cities redevelopment strategies, but with few attentions to railway stations projects. My research aims filling the gap at the intersection between railway stations and shrinking cities.
My specific target is to analyze the building of complex interactions, collaboration negotiations networks between stakeholder at the local level.
What is the specificity of the local networking and the role of specific leaders in the conduct of long term projects of urban and railway redevelopment in the shrinking cities?
A hypothesis is that shrinking territories may lack financial resources. They also can suffer the impact of the deindustrialization shock and its socio-economic effects. This situation may produce difficulties to build local consensus over ambitious redevelopment projects, and makes trust, enrolment, local appropriation issues absolutely central.
Heerlen in the Netherland will be my study cases. This city is shrinking and has a train station recently deeply renovated. The objective is to analyze the stakeholder building system from the 2000’s until today. Heerlen’s project provides a very interesting example of the central place taken by an individual who doesn’t belong to the urban nor the railway environment.
Qualitative methodology is proposed. I will articulate field researches, various local and national stakeholders in depth interviews and documents extracted from the local archives.
One of the conclusions is that the motor of railway station redevelopment in shrinking cities is very different to the classical way of doing it in metropolitan railway stations. Here we see the importance taken by brokers, in the task of joining stakeholders and finding agreements.
Mots clés : Shrinking cities|relational networks|policy collaboration|local|railway stations
A102449AR